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Skool Dayz

From: Fraulein_Feline
Date: 30 Sep 2004
Time: 18:50:35 -0400
Remote Name: 24.252.200.147

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I think that everybody my age probably had a teacher like Mr T, my 11th grade English lit teacher. We loved him and we hated him, often both at the same time.

We called him names that would have gotten our mouths washed out with Dial soap if we had ever been caught saying them.

We dedicated our Senior Yearbook to him.

He was a Teacher, with a capital T, dragging us kicking and screaming through Ayn Rand, Ernest Hemingway, Shakespeare and Jack Kerouac. He was our TEACHER, not our friend, not a surrogate parent.

And teach us he did. Even when we didn't want to learn. Even when we hated him for pushing us when we felt like we had nothing left to give. Even when we cursed him for expecting so much that we were unwilling to give.

I tell you about Mr T to make the following point. Mr T was a homosexual; he was an atheist; he was a die-hard liberal who had protested the war in Viet Nam and had spent time in Canada as a conscientious objector. He was all of these things, and none of us  knew any of this until years after graduation when Mr T died.   We attended his funeral because we were grateful to him, the years of college now behind us, knowing finally that he had prepared us so well for the world ahead of us. And while he prepared us for that world, he had kept his own feelings, his own biases, his own practices and preferences TO HIMSELF.

If a kid wanted to pray in class, Mr T encouraged him to do so. If a kid talked about fairies or fags or homos in class, Mr T continued to write calmly on the board, never batting an eye, never betraying what he was thinking as he listened to the young mind trying to wrap itself around a concept that it found difficult to accept, gently encouraging that young mind to "think it through", "do the research", "reach your own conclusions, don't just parrot your friends or your parents."  And if, like me, a kid wrote a 10 page theme paper for another class and the topic of that paper was  why the war in Viet Nam had been the right thing for the US to do and why Richard Nixon would go down in history as one of this country's greatest leaders, Mr T would help that kid organize her thoughts and express herself, never letting on that he personally thought the concepts reflected in that paper were flawed.  

Do you get it now?  If not, here's the punchline:  He was a teacher, and HE TAUGHT US! And he did it well, without interjecting his own philosophies into the lesson plan. Are teachers today that self-disciplined?  I don't think so. Classrooms today are, for the most part, nothing more than convenient forums for the recruitment of disciples. The Mr Ts of today would not only loudly proclaim their lifestyle choices, but would incorporate these into their daily lessons, demanding acceptance and inclusion and encouraging young minds to embrace the correctness of these lifestyle choices. Teachers as anti-evangelists, leading the converted down a crooked road paved with wrong choices and missed chances.  And where does an actual education come in?  It gets lost in the shuffle of "inclusion" and "acceptance" and "self-actualization."  No time for readin', writin' and 'rithmetic when you've got "How to Masturbate" pamphlets to hand out!

 Somehow or other I don't think that's what education was meant to be.

Thank you, Mr T. Because of you, I at least KNOW what a teacher should be, what a teacher can be. I grieve that the children in our schools today will never have that. And they are the poorer for it. So are we.

Last changed: 09/25/08